In the summer when my son Ian turned five, I completed the building of small, sturdy boat quite capable of venturing out in calm weather a few miles out of Bodega Harbor. I had brought back from a trip to England one of the little outboard motors, called the British Seagull, which had been designed and built to take such small boats across to Dunkirk to rescue members of the B.E.F. pushed from the continent by the German army. It was one of those timeless pieces of brilliant engineering like the Spitfire, much simpler of course, and therein lay its genius. If you gave it the correct fuel and enough air, it would run for a lifetime, yet one person could lift it and mount it on the transom of a dinghy without help.
So one foggy morning this “can-do” little boy, who was game for anything physical, and I launched the boat in the harbor and set off for southern latitudes and sunny climes in this cockleshell of a craft, no thought in my mind of meeting up with anything more threatening than nice Pacific swells and a gently rising breeze.
The foghorn out on the headland, long since removed, warned us every few minutes to keep our directions clearly in mind, though we were close enough to the water to be ever conscious of the on-shore roll of the swells originating as they did far to the northwest of us. Its sound gradually faded as we rode westward.
At this remove in time I don’t remember if we had fishing in mind or were just adventure-bound to see how the dinghy would behave on the ocean. Neither do I remember how concerned the little boy’s mother was to allow him out in a boat small enough to keep in a car garage. Neither of us was in the least concerned about our safety, though we followed all the maritime rules.
When we had been motoring for half an hour, I cut the engine to allow Ian to absorb the tranquility of the ocean early on this Fall day, to feel the rhythmic rise and fall of the swells, to hear the lapping of the waves against the hull. We let the atmosphere sink in, find bottom in our souls, spread out inside us and fill us with its blessing. Then I heard an unfamiliar sound.
It was as if the ocean had taken a vast breath and let it out with a rush. Then silence. I thought I must have been hearing things, but no, Ian said, “What was that, Dad?” Then I remembered there was a group of rocks nearby, south-west of the harbor entrance, though we should not have been anywhere near them. The current, which is southward bound, may have taken us far enough from the headland to allow us to hear waves splashing against the rocks.
“Whoosh-- a giant exhaling!”
“Humpbacks!” I told my son. “We’re out in the middle of their migration. With any luck you’ll get to see one up close.”
I started the outboard and motored in the direction of the sound. The fog was thinning though visibility was to still be measured in yards.
Suddenly the surface of the sea ahead of us turned solid and a glossy island rose above the water. I turned the boat sharply to avoid running into it, and shut down the engine to an idle.
“Whoosh,” and a plume of spray shot up into the air above the whale’s back. Ian jumped to his feet in excitement and I had to tell him to sit down and hold on in case we were struck by the whale. Another surfaced more distant, followed by several other sounds of whales breaching. We seemed to be in the middle of the pod; so to avoid collision I turned the boat and headed back the way we had come. Soon the sound of the foghorn told us we were nearing the headland and to look out for the entrance to the harbor.
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